The Dream Lord

So, I was watching a recent episode of Doctor Who (titled Amy's Choice, if you must know) and it discusses the connection between your subconscious and your dreams. I have also heard that your dreams open a window to your subconscious and what you dream about is what you're actually thinking about.

So, my question is, what do you believe the connection is between your subconscious and your dreams?

I come from a family of varied belief in all things... dreams being but one side of the whole.

My sister is a firm believer that the dream world is a connection with another plane of existence entirely. Another reality, if you will. She gets very animated in her discussions, and I admit, I am leary of this idea. She comes off as a bit crazy, to be frank. She has dream dictionaries and has met with psychics and the like, but none of that rings well with me.

Personally speaking, I believe there are two different kinds of dreams. I don't know about anyone else, but I actively dream about realistic scenarios which, more often than not, wind up happening in the waking world some weeks, months or even years later, giving that distinctive deja vu feeling. To me, those are a seperate entity entirely from dreams of subconcious rambling. I've played video games all day and then gone on to dream about them at night, because my mind is simply shuffling through events and filing them away. There are too many brilliant and surprising things in the world for me to think that dreams are just a means of making fantasy out of what you're thinking of, even though that is a part of the process.

To more directly answer your question... I have no idea, past the normal science that we know. There's more to it, but what that actually is has yet to be discovered. I can only give examples of times when the science didn't cover what happened.

Dreams are directly connected to your subconscious, as we know that dreams are shared by all, can only feature what you know in them, and most dreams tend to share similar format and content. While dreams do represent a direct interpretation by your mind for thoughts and the like, they are never what they seem and thus interpretation is needed, which is often more simple than it may seem.

As for different realms of reality being opened up by the fabric of your slumbering mind's rapid neural firings, it is improbable to even hope that is real.

To say dreams only involve the things you know is not necessarily true. You can create brand new things in dreams that you've never seen before, although they likely use textures you have seen before.

As for them opening another sort of reality, I'm not sure how else to phrase it, but I don't know how else to say you can see things before they've happened. I know it sounds odd, but I am being entirely honest when I say that I have known events were happening before they occured. That's not something that is generally accepted by scientific theory, but that doesn't make it any less true.

I've always viewed dreams as simply the product of an unchecked imagination.

In your waking hours you dedicate all of your creative power to whatever task is at hand. But while sleeping you body only runs systems necessary for life, leaving your subconcious to do what it will. In this we see an explination as to the type of dreams you have. If you only filed away daily events, or processing stray thoughts, then nightmares would not exist. However, if you just have a rampant imagination that has had some form of fear based data plugged into it, you now have the content required to have bad dreams. I see a lot of psychology in dreams too. People with negative dispositions are, probably, more prone to bad dreams, while happy people have higher frequencies of good dreams.

In dreams we see the human capacity for creative thought in its most primal form.

Scottie and Spanierd, I appreciate your input, but some of it is flawed. A lot of people have no clue about what we actually know about dreams, so here to set the record straight is fact, brought to you by the internet.

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1. You Forget 90% of Your DreamsWithin 5 minutes of waking half of your dream is forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone.

2. Blind People also DreamPeople who became blind after birth can see images in their dreams. People who are born blind do not see any images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch and emotion.

3. Everybody DreamsEvery human being dreams (except in cases of extreme psychological disorder). If you think you are not dreaming – you just forget your dreams.

4. In Our Dreams We Only See Faces That We already KnowOur mind is not inventing faces – in our dreams we see real faces of real people that we have seen during our life but may not know or remember. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces throughout our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams.

5. Not Everybody Dreams in ColorA full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. The remaining number dream in full color. Studies from 1915 through to the 1950s maintained that the majority of dreams were in black and white, but these results began to change in the 1960s. Today only 4.4% of the dreams of under-25 year-olds are in black and white. Recent research has suggested that those changing results may be linked to the switch from black-and-white film and TV to color media.

6. Dreams are SymbolicIf you dream about some particular subject it is not often that the dream is about that. Dreams speak in a deeply symbolic language. Whatever symbol your dream picks on it is most unlikely to be a symbol for itself.

7. EmotionsThe most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety. Negative emotions are more common than positive ones.

8. You can have four to seven dreams in one night.On average you can dream anywhere from one or two hours every night.

9. Animals Dream TooStudies have been done on many different animals, and they all show the same brain waves during dreaming sleep as humans. Watch a dog sleeping sometime. The paws move like they are running and they make yipping sounds as if they are chasing something in a dream.

10. Body ParalysisRapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a normal stage of sleep characterized by rapid movements of the eyes. REM sleep in adult humans typically occupies 20-25% of total sleep, about 90-120 minutes of a night’s sleep. During REM sleep the body is paralyzed by a mechanism in the brain in order to prevent the movements which occur in the dream from causing the physical body to move. However, it is possible for this mechanism to be triggered before, during, or after normal sleep while the brain awakens.

11. Dream IncorporationOur mind interprets the external stimuli that our senses are bombarded with when we are asleep and make them a part of our dreams. This means that sometimes in our dreams we hear a sound from reality and incorporate it in a way. For example you may be dreaming that you are in a concert while your brother is playing a guitar during your sleep.

12. Men and Women Dream DifferentlyMen tend to dream more about other men. Around 70% of the characters in a man’s dream are other men. On the other hand, a woman’s dream contains almost an equal number of men and women. Aside from that, men generally have more aggressive emotions in their dreams than the female lot.

13. Precognitive DreamsResults of several surveys across large population sets indicate that between 18% and 38% of people have experienced at least one precognitive dream and 70% have experienced déjà vu. The percentage of persons that believe precognitive dreaming is possible is even higher – ranging from 63% to 98%. Psychologists have explained these experiences in terms of memory biases, namely a selective memory for accurate predictions and distorted memory so that dreams are retrospectively fitted onto life experiences. The multi-faceted nature of dreams makes it easy to find connections between dream content and real events.In one experiment, subjects were asked to write down their dreams in a diary. This prevented the selective memory effect, and the dreams no longer seemed accurate about the future. Another experiment gave subjects a fake diary of a student with apparently precognitive dreams. This diary described events from the person's life, as well as some predictive dreams and some non-predictive dreams. When subjects were asked to recall the dreams they had read, they remembered more of the successful predictions than unsuccessful ones.

14. If you are snoring, then you cannot be dreaming.A strange fact about sleeping and dreams. We know that this happens, but as of now we do not have enough research to prove why.

15.You can experience an orgasm in your dreamYou can not only have sex as pleasurable as in your real life while dreaming, but also experience an orgasm as strong as a real one without any wet results. The sensations felt while lucid dreaming (touch, pleasure and etc..) can be as pleasurable and strong as the sensations experienced in the real world.

16. Depressed people dream moreThis is easy to understand, to be honest. Serotonin and dopamine effect many different psychological disorders, and are also the main neurotransmitters in charge of producing dreams. More activity of these transmitters leads to more dreams and more psychological disorders. Schizophrenia, for instance, has been described under these guidelines as "waking reality processed through the dreaming brain."

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Debate it all you want, but these are facts. I have checked on multiple sites and gone through the links attached to the scientific research (I have no life). So, there you go. Outside of these things, though, we actually know very little about dreams. This, it seems, is really some of the only concrete fact we have about them, but we are making strides. I am sure I missed a few other facts, so if I did please add.

Many of those I cannot argue, whether I'm inclined to or not, but my friend, 13 is not correct.

I have made detailed notes about my deja vu dreams and left them to wait. I mean expressions on faces, words spoken, events occuring. Studies aside, I have been spot on pinpoint accurate to a letter. That test of writing made no difference. It is as I wrote, going so far as to even bring my notes to the attention of the people gathered to have them verify it themselves.

To continue, 4 has no way of being proven, scientifically or otherwise. It is literally an impossiblity for someone to wake up and say, "These are the faces I saw, can you find them in the world?" and then have it be done. People have created the most fantastic of things, and they have done so through day-dreaming and imagination. Why is it then, that it is so unlikely you can do it in your sleep? That seems like flawed logic.

Also, in numbers such as 6, it says it is not usual. This does not mean it does not occur, and indicates that there is no certainty to the science, which makes that science a theory. Theories are disproven daily, with new ideas replacing them as quickly as they fall.

10 is also incorrect, which has been proven (and disproven, and proven again, and disproven, and is actually not settled on yet) by various studies, even if it is not typically the norm. More typically, it shows in animals than people, but we are not exempt from the anamoly of movement during REM.

2 may or may not be correct, as the only proof to the contrary is the statement of a blind friend who was born blind that he has in fact seen images in his dreams.

14 seems false. My father literally sleeps while constantly snoring, but gets very animated about the dreams he has had. As I said, it seems false, because it is possible that he dreams between snores or some other oddity.

I mean no disrespect, but I would ask you to triplecheck the actual source of those facts. Some of them are common knowledge, a couple are absolutely without a doubt incorrect, and a few are questionable. Science is rarely as reliable as people make it seem, whether they are facts or theories, because people have a knack for being tricky in their wording, as it shows in your list.

This is a Psychological question. There are no flawed inputs, however, within context of psychological disputes.

Dreams unlock a whole new self one cannot comprehend through their daily lives. One's dreams are the threads that tie to one's subconscious, as Sigmund Freud frequently stresses through countless studies. Through dreams, one can know more about their childhood, their inner desires, and what will become. However, the evidence on Freud's logic concerning dreams is, once again, open to dispute as Freudian logic is a hard theory to prove or disprove. Even though one cannot prove or disprove Freud, that does not leave his theory useless since it offers enough evidence to build upon. I may agree with Freud that dreams do, in fact, tie with our subconscious; but, based upon lack of evidence, I cannot prove it. Eventually, we'll be able to study REMs and brain patterns to understand the concept of dreams. But, until that day comes, no answer is absolute.

Scottie, I am not going to argue with you, but if you really want to debate all of those points, go ahead and e-mail the scientists backing the facts with research. Science is about everyone checking up on everyone, not just one person checking his own information. People do not talk with scientists enough like that, and they are usually more than willing to answer such questions. As for your personal beliefs, whether they be strange delusion or some breakthrough of the human psyche, have them.

But let me just say this: understanding comes from drawing conclusions from your evidence. When the reverse happens then you are no longer on the path to understanding. You would be surprised what science can know these days.

And nothing is impossible. Highly improbable. But never impossible. We say that word and you again put a roadblock up on the path to understanding.

That's my point, though, about the research. I don't doubt that they have logic behind their actions. I don't doubt that they have research. I don't doubt that they did work! But you're right, you have to draw from your evidence. I have my evidence, and I have what scientists have declared. What has been declared is quite solid, and also goes completely against what I have for experience. This leaves me with the logic that scientists are wrong about things often. If they are often wrong, then that means that their current ability to research has not accounted for every facet of the study necessary to fully understand the question. That is not an exageration. A popular saying my science professor enjoyed was that being a scientist is the easiest job in the world; all you do is pick a subject and get it wrong a hundred times. It is a block in understanding to take them at their word. The greatest people in history often shunned the scientists of their time. Galileo was brilliant, and he believed nothing that was delivered to him by the men of science. Nothing has changed from then to now. We have theories, we have research, we have understanding, and we miss the truth anyway. I don't advise ignoring the science, my friend, I simply advise learning from what you experience. To say that scientists check with everyone is an exageration. They do no such thing. They check with their test subjects. They check with people they happen to respect. But people are arrogant and arrogance blinds. They haven't gotten to everyone.

As for impossibility being a block, it depends on context. If I were to say that it is impossible for a human being to survive without any major organs, I would be correct... for now. There are many things we do not currently have the capacity to do, and cannot occur until we find a new way. Impossible is proper; never is not.

Okay, before this dissolves into a "Science is infallible!/Science is always wrong!" debate, allow me to post MY views on dreaming.

Dreams are, quite simply, my imagination having its way with me. My nights are often filled with fantastic tales of adventure and daring, with characters who can be loyal, unpredictable, double crossers, switchers from the other side, all of whom are either based in real life, or are faceless. I don't find the facelessness unsettling- thats how I imagine people in books, too. It takes a great effort for me to se a person's face while reading (although expressions are easy to interpret). Why just the other night, I dreamed that I was part of the crew of a ship that had crash landed in a canyon. As we filed out, we took shelter in the twisting caves (which surprisingly resembled my house) along the rock-face. We had taken one of the enemy prisoner, and he was wounded and read to switch sides. We camped that night on couches an sleeping bags in a modern-type architectured house. The next morning, we were holed up in a massive toy store wit flood lights streaming in through the windows. Each one of us were being picked of one by one, and as we were individually captured, we were to act as a distraction to that our comrades could attack the enemy and save the captured ally. I woke up before it was my turn.

Now, that's just a very general overview of it. I won't go into more detail because I'm sure that would bore you. people are often far less interested in my dreams than they should be. In any case, you can see that that it is just an explosion of imagination. In a dream like that I don't need to know whether or not I am dreaming or not- it doesn't at all pertain to real life. I also have more realistic dreams, too. Recently I dreamed that a man came up to me and told me that I had to get married to someone I had never met before almost immediately, to help him with a plan he had to carry out. Through dream logic I saw nothing wrong with it, and preparations were rushed. In the end, though, I found out who it was (someone I don't ever want to marry) and called it off. Everyone wanted to know why, though, so the reason I gave was that I wanted my actual wedding to be perfect, and these rushed preparation would not do. And that I wanted to choose whom I marry. Throughout all this, I had a vague notion that I was dreaming, but I couldn't control enough to make a difference (generally when I have a lucid dream, I spend the whole thing flying).

In that dream I can see elements from my real life (my sister got married last year, I have been watching a lot of burn notice lately, and that show has a lot of weird and crazy plans). I suppose that is what imagination is, too. It is taking what you know and twisting it and forming it into endless possibilities, what ifs, if you will. And this goes a step further, to. If I have have never done something, and then dream about doing it, it is not a dream of action, but of inaction. If, for example, i am dreaming about being with someone, and it becomes clear that we are going to kiss (which I have never done), issue after issue will come up, whether it's a person interrupting us, a sudden car ride that we MUST take, or who knows what, we will not kiss, and soon I will wake up. I think this is because you cannot do in a dream what you cannot imagine. I have read countless adventure books, so a dream of great adventure is no problem. Seeing my get married and helping to plan it made it easy to toy with the idea of a rushed engagement. Something as simple as a kiss, however, is impossible. I dream of holding hands, talking and laugh, even leaning in, but the simple and yet indescribable act of a kiss will not happened, and it can not happen until it does in real life.

anyway back to you original question hippiefly, the relationship between dreams and your subconscious. To put it simply most people seem to believe that dreams are you subconscious thoughts or hidden desires that you conscious mind represses for reasons only you can answer. Dreams are full of symbols so instead of seeing a person in your dream and thinking, "oh hey look its____" you might want to think what qualities does that person have or what do you think oh when you see said person. Now with this in mind you should over examine dreams because sometimes they are more amusing than your subconscious desperately trying to tell you something. Dreams are the playground for imagination so you really have to use your own discretion when trying to figure out if you dream is entertainment or something more. Did that help at all?

she: whole it was interesting to hear your dream remember the point of the post. If you want to tell us about your dreams start another thread. Your last paragraph would have been plenty.

F.M.H.B. wrote:Scottie, I am not going to argue with you, but if you really want to debate all of those points, go ahead and e-mail the scientists backing the facts with research. Science is about everyone checking up on everyone, not just one person checking his own information. People do not talk with scientists enough like that, and they are usually more than willing to answer such questions. As for your personal beliefs, whether they be strange delusion or some breakthrough of the human psyche, have them.

But let me just say this: understanding comes from drawing conclusions from your evidence. When the reverse happens then you are no longer on the path to understanding. You would be surprised what science can know these days.

And nothing is impossible. Highly improbable. But never impossible. We say that word and you again put a roadblock up on the path to understanding.

Actually, about point number 4, Scottie has it right. There is no way a research scientist can prove that we are not recreating faces in our dreams. We create and recreate, as humans, that is our nature. However, I'm not saying you are wrong, since point 4 is not proven; but, point 4 is not backed by scientific research as that would require a scientist to map out every face their test subject comes across.

Thank you, all of you. I dream frequently, probably every night, and remember them (which would be evidence for the point about depressed people dream more).

She, it is good to know other people have the same kind of ridiculous dreams that I have where things just kind of change as you're dreaming and you don't realize it until you wake and are like, "Wait a minute...how did we end up there?" (Maybe that doesn't happen to you, but it happens to me all the time).

In my creative writing class my senior year of high school, we talked about symbols and symbols in your dreams and if your dreams are just an extension of your imagination, it's likely that I have a lot of symbols in my dreams as I load my writing with lots and lots of symbols. I also look for hidden meanings in everything, so it's possible I'm just making up crazy stories while I sleep.

But that was all really just hooplah.

And again, thanks guys. You can keep this discussion going if you'd like, but I was just curious what others thought about dreams.

Within the constructed unreality of the mind is a world as little understood as any that actually exists. The mere fact we need sleep, like need to live, is strange.

From personal experience? There's nothing really special about dreams. It is the mind busying itself whilst the body recovers. If you were stuck someplace for hours at a time always, you would find somwthing to do too. This is dreaming.

The only fact we really know is that dreams weren't created for a purpose or for any reason. They, like everything else, just are.

It was an anology. Did I not make that clear somehow? I didn't mean the mind literally sits there and jacks off while you're sleeping cus it's bored. I meant that sleep is an inactive event, and since the mind can't really shut off with the body (cus, well, you'd be dead) then perhaps dreams are like twidling your thumbs, or organizing a room, or limbering up neurally, or, hell, maybe even masturbating mentally.

You obviously both missed my point with that. The mind can't just stop. It has to always be doing something, literally, or you die, also literally. So, in the void of activity that is your slepp, the mind continues to shoot electic signals across the brain-grid of your mind, firing off senses, memories, and other perts of the mind accidentally in the process of idling and subconciously attempts to make sense of them so as not to go insane. Hence, dreams.

F.M.H.B. wrote:I meant that sleep is an inactive event, and since the mind can't really shut off with the body (cus, well, you'd be dead) then perhaps dreams are like twidling your thumbs, or organizing a room, or limbering up neurally